Robert Browning : Home Thoughts From Abroad ABOUT Robert Browning : Home Thoughts From Abroad I Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England�now! II And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops�at the bent spray's edge� That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture! And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, All will be gay when noontide wakes anew The buttercups, the little children's dower �Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

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Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge— That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture! And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, All will be gay when noontide wakes anew The buttercups, the little children's dower —Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower! Home Thoughts, From Abroad Poem by Robert Browning - Poem Hunter Home Thoughts, From Abroad Poem by Robert Browning - Poem Hunter Home Thoughts, From Abroad - Poem by Robert Browning Autoplay next video Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now! And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!

Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge— That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture! And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, All will be gay when noontide wakes anew The buttercups, the little children's dower —Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower! Poem:~ O, To Be In England Now That April 's There ~ Robert Browning ~ Read by Samuel West - YouTube Close Poem:~ O, To Be In England Now That April 's There ~ Robert Browning ~ Read by Samuel West Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. The interactive transcript could not be loaded. Loading... Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Apr 29, 2014 "Home-Thoughts From Abroad', Read by Samuel West.

Robert Browning (7 May 1812 -- 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" was written in 1845 while Browning was on a visit to northern Italy, and was first published in his Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. 'One of the greatest sources of poetical delight is description, or the power of presenting pictures to the mind'. So said Dr. Johnston and in the poetry of natural the world vivid pictures abound. Who can fail to recognise the imagery of a 'host of golden daffodils' ( and, indeed, the poem), or the description of the skylark as if soars in the sky above? The most insignificant creatures have fascinated the poets: the tiniest frog or spider or bee, the humble mole, each has given rise to a portrait in words. The seasons have also provided inspiration: the pleasures of ambling along a country lane in Spring; the 'mists and mellow fruitfulness' of Autumn; The silvery sharpness of a frosty Winters's day.

For many poets, the small details in nature have confirmed a spiritual belief. Others have witnessed, often idealised, a simpler way of life, now largely passed. But it is the depth of feeling that nature instils in the poet which truly captures our hearts: 'Oh, to be in England now that April's there' ! David Ansdell Project MUSE - Robert Browning’s Homesickness Robert Browning’s Homesickness Alison Chapman (bio) Robert Browning’s “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” is conventionally known as one of the most patriotic poems in the English language. Although the poem in its original print context is the first of three dramatic monologues, it is invariably seen in popular British culture, as well as in the history of its print circulation in the nineteenth century, as a stand-alone lyric poem celebrating the best of English nationhood. The poem has attracted surprisingly little attention from critics, perhaps because of difficulty with placing its apparent expression of English nationalism within the context of Browning’s more uneasy investigations of the construction of nationhood and of cosmopolitanism.

This essay argues that “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” is a deceptively simple poem that in fact interrogates the very patriotism it has been taken to celebrate. Furthermore, the poem is an important part of Browning’s experimentation with the dramatic lyric form, and particularly the concept of voice in relation to proximity and distance. “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” reveals the importance of reading Browning’s poems as expressive and interrogative at the very same time. In addition, the complex hybrid genre adopted in the poem participates in nineteenth-century discussions about the relation between England and Europe, in a way that recalls Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “contact zones,” over-determined social spaces where cultures encounter one another, and jostle for position, often within asymmetrical and complex power structures. The poem’s fundamental dynamic between home and the foreign suggests the importance of border crossing, a movement within and between contact zones, across frontiers and boundaries that are geographical, cultural, political and textual: a movement that, I argue, structures the very concept of the lyric poet itself, always a vital concern for Browning.

In a recent and hugely popular endeavor by the British Broadcasting Corporation to record major poems by famous actors, the actor Geoffrey Palmer reads “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” with music playing softly in the background. 1 The choice of the Largo section (second movement) of Antonin Dvorak’s New World Symphony is important, especially to British ears, because it cites a previous and famous use of this section as the soundtrack (arranged for brass band) to a series of well-known television advertisements [End Page 469] for Hovis bread, directed by Ridley Scott, and much replayed. The Hovis advertisement was voted in 2006 the most-loved advertisement in Britain, for the nostalgic portrayal of a northern town with a small boy pushing a bike up cobbled streets and carrying loaves of Hovis, associating the packaged bread with what is quintessentially English. 2 In fact, the popular commercial Classic FM station in Britain reported that it was inundated with requests for the “Hovis music,” originally composed to commemorate the discovery of the Americas (see Byrne). It might seem peculiar to associate Robert Browning with a loaf of brown bread.

But the BBC recitation of “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” chose a canny patriotic soundtrack. Subtitled “The greatest poems, the finest voices, glorious music,” the “Words for You” series of recited poems can be purchased as a CD and seen on YouTube (where it has its own TV channel). 3 Palmer is perhaps at first glance an unlikely choice, known for his deadpan humor and stuffy, middle-class buffoonery, as his Wikipedia entry puts it, in portrayals of such popular British sit-com characters as Reggie Perrin’s brother-in-law in The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin and the phlegmatic husband in Butterflies. 4 But Browning’s poem suits such an actor perfectly, for like all Browning’s dramatic lyrics, “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” is in fact supremely ironic. In the nineteenth century, the poem was seen as a quintessential expression of English patriotism. It was reprinted, for example, in Mary Isabella Lovejoy’s Poetry of the Seasons anthology of 1898 as exemplary of spring.

5 In the 1846 essay “Past and Present Condition of British Poetry,” Browning’s poem provided an example of “the mere twaddle of a cockney at Calais or Cologne,” thus registering its patriotism as empty verbosity but not as irony. 6 Patriotic Song: A Book of English Verse, gives the poem room, as does The Penny Illustrated Paper for 1868, and, indeed, there were many reprints in the Victorian period, all, so far as I can determine, framing the poem as a patriotic expression of Englishness. 7 In Edward Hughes’ Select Specimens of English Poetry (1856), “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” is prefaced by a quotation from Samuel Taylor Coleridge pronouncing that: Few are sufficiently aware how much reason most of us have, even as common moral livers, to thank God for being Englishmen. It would furnish grounds both for humility towards Providence and for increased attachment to our country if each individual could but see and feel how large a part of his innocence he owes to his birth, breeding, and residence in Great Britain.

8 This extract comes from his Introduction to A Lay Sermon and pointedly laments the fact that “few” acknowledge how lucky they are to be Englishmen. 9 Coleridge’s statement of English nationalism as regrettably for the enlightened [End Page 470] “few” is an apt companion text to the poem. In “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad”, such a notion is satirized, for the speaker is one of the Coleridgean “few,” but his attachment to his country is contingent on his removal from it. The speaker longs so intensely for his English home that he creates in his imagination a detailed and idealized pastoral scene ironically grounded on his frustrated (and rather irritable) desire for his homeland. The poem suggests that home can only be appreciated when abroad, and that what is directly in front of him —the exotic —can only be depreciated: “The buttercups, the little children’s dower” are ironically “Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!” (ll. 19–20). Browning’s poem addresses the Victorian British sense of homeland as a deeply displaced zone, something always relational and contingent to the foreign.

The “gaudy melon-flower,” Browning’s synecdoche for the Other, seems to represent the southern Mediterranean, or indeed anywhere further south than England, given that melons need warm temperatures to grow (optimally 70–85°F). 10 In this disparaged aesthetics of the familiar, however, the larger, brighter, yellower melon-flower ceases to be luminous in comparison with the common, small, less yellowy, and yet unavailable English buttercup. Thus, homesickness is an aesthetics of displacement, which works ironically by bringing the distant into focus through longing, and distancing the near at hand. The poem implies that England signifies itself most through pastoral scenes in the Spring, but only in the mind and only when one is absent: these are thoughts from abroad. The sense of a displaced homeland, on which the poem’s ironies rest, is part of Browning’s engagement with the idea of the relationship between home and the foreign, and specifically between Britain and Europe. Christopher Keirstead argues that Browning investigates the uneasy ethics of cosmopolitanism, the sense that crossing into another culture depends on the luxury of mobility—as Amanda Anderson puts it in Powers of Distance —and thus elitism and privilege.

Reading the problematic concept of cosmopolitanism in Browning’s Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, Keirstead points to the anxiety inherent to the in-between spaces in Browning, the difficulty, on the one hand, with the idealization of travel as vacation and thus escape, and, on the other, with travel as an engagement with a kind of Anglo-European citizenship. 11 Keirstead’s reading is compelling, and particularly relevant for “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad,” because he links these issues with the form of the dramatic monologue itself, referring to Robert Langbaum’s classic formulation of the genre in The Poetry of Experience (1957) as exhibiting a tension between sympathy and judgment, identification and distance. Indeed, Keirstead concludes provocatively that “the dramatic monologue form reproduces the dynamics of travel itself,” and that both urge the importance, difficulty, and necessity of the uncomfortable occupation of the liminal (p. 413). The earlier poem [End Page 471] “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad,” however, voices a catastrophic failure of the cosmopolitan identity with another culture, but this failure, like the difficulty of Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, is eminently productive.

“Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” can only be read as a patriotic poem if it is also read entirely through its lyric modality. But this in itself is problematic and based on an idealization or reification of the Victorian lyric as the accessible, stable voice of a singular speaker. As a type of dramatic monologue, however, the poem’s doubleness inscribes the lyric as an authentic private utterance, and concurrently the dramatic as the discursive critical, epistemological voice, corresponding to Isobel Armstrong’s conception of the Victorian “double poem.” 12 “Home-Thoughts,” in fact, plays an important part in the chronology of Browning’s experiments with the dramatic monologue—or rather dramatic lyric—genre. The poem has an implicit addressee in the “you” of line 15, and the opening apostrophe of “Oh, to be in England” implies that the country itself is being addressed, although as Lee Erickson observes this England constitutes an absent audience. 13 But the poem does also seem extremely lyrical and interiorized.

In particular, the “you” of line 15 seems less addressed to a reader than to the listeners of the song of the “wise thrush,” which pointedly includes the speaker himself. Another way of conceiving the audience in the poem is to say that the lyric performs for the speaker alone, who is both speaker and addressee of the poem. The difficulty of identifying a stable addressee makes the lyricism of the form self-conscious and emphatic. As Jonathan Culler points out in his essay on apostrophe, “one might be justified in taking apostrophe as the figure of all that is most radical, embarrassing, pretentious, and mystifactory in the lyric, even seeking to identify apostrophe with lyric itself.” 14 He associates this equation of lyric and apostrophe with John Stuart Mill’s essay on lyric, which famously defines the form as poetry overheard, without a direct addressee.

What we might want to term tautologically the lyric apostrophe is, for Culler, an embarrassment that signifies “poetic pretension” and that authorizes “the subject’s claim that in his verse he is not merely an empirical poet, a writer of verse, but the embodiment of poetic tradition and of the spirit of poesy” (p. 143). The apostrophe is, in fact, a “sign of a fiction which knows its own fictive nature” (p. 146). In Browning’s poem, the speaker’s self-consciousness flags the voice from the start as fictive and constructed, both teasingly offering the lyric as authentic patriotism and signaling a parodic double meaning that scrutinizes and critiques the parody. The poem does not only parody patriotism, however, but a certain kind of lyricism itself. Indeed, the poem’s lyricism exposes the constructedness of lyric in this period of mass print, and figures the authenticity and presence of the lyric voice as always already displaced.

Recent critics of the Victorian lyric point to the genre’s engagement with loss, displacement, distance, and [End Page 472] distortion, mourning the loss of a link to a present, vital, oral voice through the medium of printing technologies (what Eric Griffiths terms the “printed voice” of Victorian poetry). 15 Matthew Rowlinson, for example, argues that the Victorian lyric is self-conscious about its remediation through print and becomes overtly alien to itself. 16 Yopie Prins calls for a new understanding of the “voice inverse” of Victorian poetry, a more historically sensitive reading that refuses to look for the human where it might be least available: the lyrical poem. For Prins, the voice of Victorian poetry prompts us to ask hard, uncomfortable questions about the critical recoverability of Victorian voice through a genre that precisely exposed its dissociations and disembodiments, something that I also explore in The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti. 17 As Prins points out, Browning’s poetry itself figures such problems: indeed, the title of Griffiths’ study, foundational to Prins’ agenda, is borrowed from The Ring and the Book.

Browning’s “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” offers both the idealization of lyric presence and also a powerful critique of such presence. The poem parodies the romanticized lyric voice and illustrates the political implications of insisting on proximity and what Prins calls “lyric humanism.” 18 And, in Browning’s poem, these issues crucially play out on a European stage. The idealization of the printed lyric voice is clear from an unsigned essay on “Interjections” in the Saturday Review, for 21 October 1876 (pp. 499–500). The writer complains that apostrophe is usually derided, granting “that in poor hands or feeble lips it is a mere miserable trick of speech, and persons who invariably begin their speech with an Oh! (a habit we have known) do possibly thereby betray a kinship with the lower creation” (p. 499). The essay, however, defends the interjection as “an appeal for sympathy which is humanizing, and compels the utterer to smooth his numbers”. Intriguingly, the essay then uses the first line of “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” as his primary example: When is Mr.

Browning more condescending to our prejudice in favor of tuneful verse than in the stanza beginning, Oh! to be in England Now that April’s there! (p. 500) This quotation illustrates his point that the “Oh” generally is “expressive of inarticulate want in the speaker,” and a want that cannot be communicated by language: “ [w]hen language falls short of the vast demand upon it, then does the poet condense all into an inarticulate sigh and musical groan” (p. 500). Interjections are, according to the essayist, “a great portrayer of character,” and the characteristic social interjections are what one misses most about a lost friend as his voice and presence are recalled (p. 500). Although the essay associates the lyric interjection with character and especially with expressive [End Page 473] subjectivity, the essay also acknowledges that the opening interjection of “Oh!” in Browning’s poem connotes the inexpressible.

In fact, in the context of the poem’s parodies, the start of the poem suggests that the interjection “Oh!” is both an appeal to sympathy and also a cheap shot, a “mere miserable trick of speech”: an authentic exclamation of desire, as well as a self-conscious play upon the fictive nature of the dramatic monologue genre. Writing about Wordsworth’s use of apostrophe, however (and Wordsworth is crucial to Browning’s poem, as I argue below), J. Douglas Kneale examines the classical rhetorical tradition of apostrophe, and argues that what is most commonly taken as a “turning away” (by Culler, as well as The Saturday Review), is in fact prosopopoeia, or speaking as another person or object. A true apostrophe, Kneale maintains, is a vocal turn that moves “from an original (implied or explicit) addressee to a different addressee, from the proper or intended hearer to another,” and so apostrophe proper is “a movement of voice, a translation or carrying over of address”.

19 Kneale argues that a poem beginning with an exclamatory “Oh,” which is usually taken to be a marker of apostrophe, is rather a direct passionate exclamation (or ecphoneses), because apostrophes proper interrupt discourse. But, certainly in Browning’s case, the poem’s implied start in medias res suggests that the first line’s exclamation is a kind of apostrophe, which immediately establishes the poem’s play with proximity and distance as do all apostrophes, according to Culler. But it is also an apostrophe with issues, a kind of apostrophe curtailed, as the point of the poem’s speaker is that he cannot translate himself from one place to another, a movement that apostrophe implies. The speaker’s imagination is caught up in an idealized pastoral image of his homeland, which is signified as a direct opposition to the southern foreign location from which he speaks. The meter implies an assurance and assertiveness at the outset that initially suggests a translation between home and the foreign can be achieved.

The trochaic meter of the poem seems to begin confidently—“Oh, to / be in / England”—but, as the poem progresses, the trochees seem to be more of a falling measure and are interrupted by iambic feet, a faltering reversal for example in line 7: “While the / chaffinch / sings // on the / orchard / bough”. The rhyme scheme, which includes quatrains and couplets, suggest decisive action in the first stanza, where that last word “now” looks like a command. But in the second stanza the so-called feminine rhymes (follows/ swallows, recapture/rapture, dower/flower) give the poem a melancholy dying fall, undoing the confident exhortation of the first stanza.

20 As Herbert Tucker argues, Browning’s poems “undertake intricate subversions of their protagonists’ initial power of imaginative autonomy, personal priority, unadulterated intention”, 21 as exemplified in that first line’s bold assertion “Oh to be in England!” The poem’s various contingencies articulate what is also suggested by the title: that careful comma, separating “Home-Thoughts” “from [End Page 474] Abroad” places them in tension, so that a longing for a perfect homeland can only be here, from abroad. And, for those in England, the beauties of the morning are unacknowledged, just as Coleridge laments in his Lay Sermons. In Browning’s poem, the impossibility of lyric is closely bound up with the vexed notion of Englishness. That the poem creates a version of England free from the nasty, dirty, messy, industrial reality of most Britain’s mundane experience is something almost all my students comment when they first read the poem.

We have no date of composition, but the poem was first published in Dramatic Lyrics and Romances on 6 November 1845, and may have been inspired by Browning’s visits to Italy in the summer of 1838 and the autumn of 1844. This England is one of birdsong, dewy fields, trees and orchards. Not only that, but the poem’s bipartite structure repeats its message twice like the “wise thrush,” in case you haven’t been paying attention: what Tucker, associating the poem with the Duke’s utterances in “My Last Duchess,” calls the “anxious interval between self-assertive moments” (p. 293). Elizabeth Barrett commented on the joke of this line when she first read the poem: “Your spring-song is full of beauty as you know very well—& ‘that’s the wise thrush,’ so characteristic of you, (& of the thrush too) that I was sorely tempted to ask you to write it ‘twice over,’ . .

& not send the first copy to Mary Hunter notwithstanding my promise to her.” 22 Barrett coyly aligns the thrush with Browning himself, referring to the long western rhetorical tradition of symbolizing the lyric poet with birdsong. 23 Such insistence on England as a perfect pastoral sits uneasily with the poem’s context in the hungry forties: with, for example, the People’s Charter of May 1838, the Chartist riots of 1839 and 1842, the debate leading up to the Factory Act of 1844 (reducing the hours children aged 8–13 worked from 9 hours to 6.5 hours per day), and the Irish Famine of 1845–1849 (the first news of which may have reached Browning in the early autumn of 1845, a couple of months before the poem was first published on 6 November). 24 In addition, the period of the poem’s probable composition saw the intensification of debate about the Corn Laws, which culminated in their repeal in 1846.

Browning’s dramatic monologue “The Englishman in Italy” ends with an incongruous and unexpected turn in which the speaker overtly criticizes the Corn Laws, significantly associating an idyllic and idealized Italian setting with English political debate. 25 In “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” the criticism of England is more oblique, and the speaker’s location in Italy implicit, but “The Englishman in Italy” (originally entitled “Italy in England”) also implies a kind of tourist irony, for the speaker’s sudden, throwaway, even casual opposition to the Corn Laws (which raised the price of corn and caused famine in Britain) to an Italian peasant girl, while he enjoys the sensual pleasures of Italy, could also be seen as a grandiose ineffectual gesture, never mind tactless. 26 The vision of England in Browning’s poem can only exist from abroad, at one [End Page 475] remove from the poem’s political and social contexts. The poem’s patriotic confidence falters for good reason.

The anxiety in the poem over an auditor —the strange “you” that seems to include the speaker, the “wise thrush” that sings twice —underlines the fact that the poem’s message goes unheard for the very reason that it is almost irrelevant. This is part of the poem’s irony, that its vision of patriotism rests upon an England that is becoming quickly obsolete for most of its inhabitants. In his dramatic monologues, as Isobel Armstrong has so powerfully shown, Browning satirizes John Stuart Mill’s celebration of the lyric as the Wordsworthian overflow of feeling, as “overheard” rather than heard, as “feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind” (p. 137). Armstrong argues that Browning’s dramatic monologues parody such a separation of poetry from the external world as a “poetics of exclusion” (p. 137).

The poems on which Armstrong focuses, “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Johannes Agricola in Meditation”—published originally as “Madhouse Cells”—are about the perverted “solipsism of expressive emotion privately experienced” (p. 139) that lead to mania and delusion. “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” is much more coy about delusional thinking. After all, this poem has none of the “greedy violence” (p. 138) of the other two earlier monologues of 1836. Nevertheless, in this later poem, the contingencies of “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” make this, too, a delusional poem, if a subtler one. As an engagement with Mill, Browning’s pastoral scene yokes homesickness with poetry itself as lyric solipsism, ironically suggesting that the intense desire to be back home creates a displacement and a delusion that is also the poetic condition of Mill’s lyric.

With such solipsism, there is no stable, singular auditor (as we have seen), just as in “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Johannes Agricola in Meditation” the addressees are absent and silent. If one talks of Browning as performing home in this poem, then, it is an absent, distant and insistently unobtainable home. The more England is described the more the speaker’s removal from England is emphasized, leading almost inevitably to the irritation in the last line (which in Geoffrey Palmer’s reading is uttered with a huge swerve in the tone). A longing for home is pathologized, but the poem goes one stage further. Homesickness is a sickness, but it is also the condition of the lyric poet. That startling image in the final line, the “gaudy melon-flower,” is crucial to my argument here. This synecdoche for the foreign is also, ironically, a synecdoche for the Wordsworthian pastoral, a mode that had become, by this date, a stereotype for the association of landscape with Englishness. In other words, the pastoral in “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” is highly derivative.

The pastiche is evident in the poem’s descriptions of the countryside, a [End Page 476] list of features drawing on a stock Romantic style—birdsong, orchard, dewy fields, buttercups—that have become signifiers by the 1840s of a landscape of retreat. 27 In his Advertisement to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth famously decried the “gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers,” and attested instead to his poetry’s language of common man. In Browning’s poem, the “gaudy melon-flower” also connotes the inauthentic, but the joke is turned back onto Wordsworth, whose cultural value was so debased by the 1840s. Browning’s poem, so full of trite, inane Wordsworthian pastoral images, is the inauthentic “gaudy melon-flower.” The contempt of this final line is a contempt for the poem itself, as a parody of Wordsworthian poetics. The poem turns itself inside out: a lyric that parodies lyricism, and a declaration of patriotism that satirizes Englishness.

Furthermore, it questions the very stability, location, and indeed existence of the lyric voice as anything but delusional. “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” was originally the first of a tripartite poem of the same name on its first publication in Dramatic Lyrics and Romances (1845). This poem was followed by two others, later titled in 1849 “Here’s to Nelson’s Memory” and “Home-Thoughts, from the Sea.” Although there is evidence from the manuscript that the poems were originally composed as separate texts, 28 the juxtaposition in Dramatic Lyrics and Romances of “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” with a beer-drinking song celebrating Nelson and a lyric spoken on a sea voyage that also marks Trafalgar suggests the very constructedness of the poems that all apparently celebrate patriotism. The drinking song boasts that the speaker is Nelson’s “to command in prose or rhyme,” and its later inclusion in the series “Nationality in Drinks” in 1863 indicates its comedic qualities. In this song, patriotism for a national hero is sung from the bottom of a “deep” (l. 4) beer glass.

The short poem “Home-Thoughts, from the Sea” also includes a joke, as Warren U. Ober and John H. Panabaker have argued, based on a misrhyme of “say” with “Africa” as well as an enfeebled meter, that calls into question the sentiments of the line “‘Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?’—say” (l. 5). 29 Both poems that follow the original publication of “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” seem to celebrate British naval power, the latter by ticking off all the landmarks of victory spotted on a sea voyage: “Jervis’s victory at Cape St. Vincent, Drake’s at Cadiz Bay, and Nelson’s at Trafalgar—and also that symbolic bastion of empire, the Rock of Gibraltar,” as Ober and Panabaker put it (p. 38). “The majestic chorale in the theme of British imperial power subsides in the diminuendo of the final line, as Browning realizes that, in contrast to the mysteries of the earth and the cosmos, national power and unexamined patriotism count for very little” (p.

41), they conclude, seeing in the poem a caution against nationalist pride. As the first section in the series, “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” sets up this critique of patriotism with its [End Page 477] satire on the delusions of homesickness. As a whole, the series has a disjointed form. The three diverse but ironic speakers (one full of longing and irritation, the next with its song praising Nelson fuelled by British beer, and the final awkward questioning lyric with odd fifteen-beat lines) imply that its patriotism might be exemplary, but it is also eccentric. While these Coleridgean “few” celebrate national pride, they also question the very foundation of that patriotic fervor. In its original context, “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” not only ironically constructs homesickness as the poetic condition, but also implies that this condition questions what it means to be patriotic.

Robert Browning showed the poems to Elizabeth Barrett in October 1845 during their courtship, and Barrett pointed out that the “fragments,” as she called them, needed a title to aid the perplexed reader: And now when you come to print these fragments, would it not be well if you were to stoop to the vulgarism of prefixing some word of introduction, as other people do, you know, . . a title . . a name? You perplex your readers often by casting yourself on their intelligence in these things—and although it is true that readers in general are stupid & cant understand, it is still more true that they are lazy & wont understand . . . & they dont catch your point of sight at first unless you think it worth while to push them by the shoulders & force them into the right place. Now these fragments . . . you mean to print them with a line between . . & not one word at the top of it . . now dont you? And then people will read “Oh, to be in England” & say to themselves . . “Why who is this? . . who’s out of England?” Which is an extreme case of course,—but you will see what I mean . .

& often I have observed how some of the very most beautiful of your lyrics have suffered just from your disdain of the usual tactics of writers in this one respect. (BC, 11:109–110). Barrett here senses something crucial about the poems: that they are fragments, suggesting incompletion, and that the meaning is implied. But she also suggests that the reader will be perplexed, and this registers the distancing of the poems from their audience and her anxiety that Browning should bring them back in. The title, “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” that Browning adds after her suggestion, does not actually help identify the speaker. Barrett’s theoretical question “Why who is this? . . who’s out of England” might be an extreme case of ignorant reading, but it still pertains to the poems, astutely underlining the problem with the location of the lyric voice. The distancing and displacement of the speaker and the reader—or, rather, what Barrett calls their perplexing, of which Browning was indeed famously often accused—is in fact underlined [End Page 478] by the title, with that distancing mechanism of the comma.

What makes the displacement even more prominent is the fact that Browning gave a copy of the poem to Barrett on the apparent eve of her departure for Italy for her health, which in context makes it an odd kind of valediction poem. Browning makes that connection himself in his reply, suggesting that the poem’s longing for England by a foreigner in Italy turns his reader, Elizabeth Barrett, into the speaker—and then his quip about joining her turns the poem back into a longing for Italy spoken by a frustrated lover: “Oh to be in Pisa. Now that E.B.B. is there!” (BC, 11:111). Browning’s manuscript for “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad”—that is, the first section of the series—was originally written in an edition of Daniello Bartoli’s De’Simboli Trasportati al Morale, which was published in 1830, as Jacob Korg discloses, by Browning’s old Italian tutor Angelo Cerutti to help his pupils learn the language.

Browning frequently used this book, a collection of sermons on moral discipline by a Jesuit, and took it with him to Italy in 1838 and 1844 for help with practicing his Italian. His name and his sister Sarianna’s appear in the list of subscribers. 30 Browning recalled later how, “yawning over” the book, he turned to the fly-leaf and wrote the poem (along with “How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”). 31 The irony is clear: “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad,” with its disdain (to use Barrett’s phrase) for the foreign, is written in a book fashionable in the nineteenth century for teaching Italian prose. The poem in manuscript engages with its material context ironically as the speaker revels in his idealization of England and refuses to engage with his immediate southern reality. The poem in manuscript thus displaces the foreign doubly: rather than a cosmopolitan engagement with the south, the speaker simply longs for home and bolsters his Englishness through layering the poem with derivative pastoral details.

The irony is compounded with the current material condition of Browning’s copy of De’Simboli Trasportati al Morale, now held at Balliol College Library, in which the original inscription of the poem is entirely erased from the inside of the front cover ( Figure 1 ). 32 A note in Robert Browning’s hand on the top left of the front cover informs us that the poem was originally written here. The original inscription of “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” is lost to us, and all we have is a poem remediated through print: entirely appropriate for a poem that parodies the immediacy and presence of the lyric voice. Compounding the irony is the fact that the poet’s own initialed inscription on his copy of Bartoli is the evidence we have for the poem’s original moment of composition, and presumably Browning inscribed the book thus when he gave it to Mrs. Sutherland Orr (Alexandra Leighton) on March 14, 1887 (according to the dedication on the facing page). The copy of Bartoli is valuable for what it no longer supplies, memorializing the poem’s composition.

The circulation of this poem underscores the poem’s ironies; it was reproduced many times [End Page 479] as a prized example of Victorian patriotism, an exemplarity contingent on the very idealization of lyric voice that the poem parodies. Click for larger view Figure 1. Browning’s copy of De’Simboli Trasportati al Morale, Balliol College Library, University of Oxford. As a poem about homesickness, a rejection of the foreign and an idealization of England, “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” is ironically self-conscious about its lyric displacement of an audience. If patriotism is contingent upon a removal from one’s homeland, so lyric poetry is contingent upon a rejection of readership. The conceptual matrix of homesickness and patriotism collide in an ironic commentary on the lyric poet, who sings his song twice over but has no one to hear. Perhaps this irony explains why Geoffrey Palmer is seen reading the poem alone, in the BBC video clip, in a tiny studio, without engaging the camera. 33 In any case, Palmer’s is a reading that Browning would no doubt admire.

Browning’s projection of the lyric poet is someone isolated, full of bitter longing, but also full of a misplaced patriotism and, overall, someone supremely constructed. In the ironies of the speaker’s rejection of “this gaudy [End Page 480] melon-flower” and the foreignness that it represents, however, the poem gestures to the transnationalism that the speaker rejects, and what Mary Louise Pratt terms “contact zones,” “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today”. 34 Pratt specifies this term as embedded in the relationship between Europe and its empire, between metropoles and periphery, as a relationship of inequality: “a space of colonial encounters, a space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into context with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, racial inequality, and intractable conflict” (Imperial Eyes, p. 6).

Such zones are complex structures of power, which warrant the usage of the problematic term “transnational.” Sharon Marcus argues that “transnational” should not be used to describe interactions between countries with symmetrical power structures, 35 but it is important to recognize that European relations were anything but symmetrical within a western context. In fact, the concept of the “zone” directly addresses this complex nexus of power across a variety of political and cultural structures. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever translate the “zone” into a specifically European context, for example arguing that the English Channel, so over-determined in the nineteenth century of course, is a prime instance of a contact zone: “Like any cultural field, the Channel zone is characterized by the agglomeration of a range of formal and informal institutions that produce and distribute symbolic and economic capital.” 36 Cohen and Dever reformulate Pratt’s postcolonial concept for a European context. For them, border crossings into and within Europe constitute “a structure produced through the intersection of other structures that are coherent formations in their own right.” In border crossings, the contact zone refers to the passage across national and institutional frontiers, and the circumnavigation of cultural, geographical, political and textual spaces.

“Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” suggests that, however necessary the European contact zone is for a productive liberal transnationalism, the power imbalance on which it depends undermines the space of encounter. The very stanzaic layout mimics the contact zone as an asymmetrical encounter between two structures. Although the speaker ends the first stanza, set in April in the present, with the emphatic “In England—now!” (l. 9), the second stanza suddenly occurs in May, a jump in the insistent present of the first stanza that is also presented as the natural and inevitable progression of “And after April, when May follows” (l. 10). The gap between the two stanzas, the difference between them, is paradoxically an encounter both self-consciously created and yet also said not to exist: the “wise thrush,” after all, “sings each song twice over” (l. 14) in a display of reiteration. As Herbert Tucker argues, this is a poetic undoing, a reversal of the poem’s [End Page 481] initial assertiveness that undermines the poetic bravado of the lyric persona.

The spatial gap between poem’s two stanzas signifies a kind of textual contact zone that is white, blank space. If this is a contact zone, it signifies a space of encounter, but also a space that is empty. Browning’s poem exposes the vexed relation of the south to the north of Europe, and the synecdoche of the “gaudy melon-flower” creates a rhetorical contact zone, but only very tentatively through the poem’s negativity and irony. As with so many of Browning’s dramatic monologues, the speaker means so much more than he says (to adopt W. David Shaw’s powerful phrase), and in the poem’s ironies the rejection of a relationship between England and the south implies its very opposite. 37 Browning’s portrayal of homesickness, then, might symbolize the lyric condition—a displacement which ironically brings the distant into focus through longing, and distances the near at hand —but it also, through its form as a deeply skeptical double poem, gestures to a creation of a poetic European contact zone based on proximity not distance. The double poem, embedding lyric expressivity and its dramatic critique, is integral to the collision of power structures implied in the contact zone.

The double poem, in fact, not only inscribes the idealization of Victorian lyric vocality and its profound loss, but also tells us how integral is the play of presence and absence, familiar and foreign, home and abroad, to the culture of Victorian poetry.

Question: Who wrote the 1845 poem 'Home Thoughts from Abroad'?
Answer: Robert Browning